Walk the Earth as Brothers
Can the dreams of innocent youth survive the horrors that reality oftentimes thrusts upon us without regard, nightmares years in length, unrelenting, perverse and constant? Do we have the fortitude and resilience to withstand everything that fate seems to hurl at us and come out the better for it?
Ian and Daniel are Polish Jewish brothers who, at the outset of World War II, have dreams of becoming architects, engineers of a bright future for all mankind. Then, of course, Hitler invades Poland and chaos ensues.
Bereft of home and family and, more importantly, each other, both young men find love in the most unexpected of places, Ian in a Paris thrown into turmoil and Daniel in a Siberian gulag. But love is just a temporary oasis. Ian, the younger sibling, has to flee Paris, avoiding detection as a Jew, and join a ragtag group of Polish exiles skirting arrest, trying to make their way aiming eventually for the British Isles and a renewed fight against the occupying Nazis. Daniel’s enemies are myriad: Nazis, Stalinists, thieves, and murderers.
Rozycki captures not only the feel of nightmare but the emotional scarring that occurs to people deprived of footing in reality, separated from loved ones and from all hope that life can revert to the way it was before. He does not paint a rosy picture; this is not a Disney version of World War II. The reader suffers along with Daniel and Ian and prays for their survival, not just physical, but emotional as well. In such a cruel world, not everyone does survive. Loss takes its toll. Hopefully, we learn something from it. Loss of love. Loss of dignity. But, in the end, a strength to carry on.
